Radio Free Boston by Carter Alan

Author:Carter Alan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781555538262
Publisher: Northeastern University Press
Published: 2013-11-06T21:00:00+00:00

Sharing the love with U2 from 1980 until the end. The ’BCN staff hangs with the Edge in Foxboro Stadium (1997). Courtesy of WBCN.

The remaining forty people, which included U2 and their manager Paul McGuinness, sympathetic ’BCN staffers, and an embarrassed Capitol Records’ representative, stayed to watch Barooga Bandit proceed in an exercise of futility. While that band would soon fade into obscurity, U2’s star had just risen above the horizon, leading to many future encounters in Boston, including a pair of headlining sellouts at the Paradise just three months later and the band’s first arena show in America at the Worcester Centrum two years after that.

“In the days when we used to come and play the Paradise we made friends with Carter Alan and the folks at WBCN who really supported us. Consequently, our rise in the Boston area was very rapid,” Adam Clayton told the Boston Globe in 2005.

“WBCN, they were banging U2’s music from the very beginning,” Larry Mullen Jr. observed in U2’s book. “So when we went to Boston, it was a bit like a homecoming. It was a big deal for us. You could say we broke out of Boston.”

Bono was more succinct. In a video clip sent to the station for its twenty-fifth birthday celebration, he filmed himself walking along the beach in Howth, Ireland, smiling broadly, then blurting, “If it wasn’t for ’BCN, we’d all be fucked!”

U2 visited the station for the first time in May 1981, for an interview that Ken Shelton found to be one of his most memorable. The members were more than willing to be guest DJS, and the teenage Larry Mullen sounded hilarious when acting the part of a loudmouth American weatherman giving his report. “My favorite interviews were the new, up-and-coming people,” Shelton commented, “like U2, who were just so happy to be on the radio.” Before their fame had arrived, John Cougar (Mellencamp), R.E.M., Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Patti Smith, the Motels, and Talking Heads, among many others, would arrive at the station during this period as young, virtually untested talents. “From Elvis to Elvis,” commented David Bieber. “That’s what the station was all about.”

The experimental attitude was, perhaps, best exemplified by the WBCN Rock ’n’ Roll Rumble, an annual event in which the station sought to crown Boston’s best up-and-coming band from a field of two dozen contenders. The local competition, spread out over nine nights, was the brainchild of Bieber, who launched a prototype of the contest in 1978 at the Inn-Square Men’s Bar in Cambridge. “Eddie Gorodetsky and I came up with the original concept. We didn’t want to call it a battle of the bands, and in one of our brainstorming sessions we arrived at the title, which was sort of linked [pun intended] to the Link Wray song [1958’s instrumental ‘Rumble’].” By 1979, the competition had shifted over to the Rat in Kenmore Square for its official first year. “The Boston music community was coming into its own,” Bieber continued. “We

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